She only needed to walk out the door.
And yet she remained, because George Elston had told Nicholas where to find her, and she had allowed it, and some traitorous, foolish corner of her heart still believed he would come.
She checked her chatelaine. One in the morning.
The play had ended at ten. Even accounting for the crowds and the traffic on Walton Street, he should have been here by now. If he intended to come at all.
She busied herself with tasks that did not need doing. Wiped the counter that was already clean. Banked the fire, then rebuilt it, then felt ridiculous for rebuilding it. She rearranged the cups on their hooks twice and stopped herself from doing it a third time.
Half past one.
Rain was falling. Softly at first, a tentative pattering against the high kitchen windows, then harder, then with a fury that rattled the panes in their frames. Amelia flinched at a crack of thunder and pressed her back against the wall, arms folded tight across her chest.
He is not coming.
The thought arrived with a clarity that felt less like revelation and more like something she had known for an hour and refused to name. She had given him the chance. She had left the door open, against every instinct that told her to bolt it shut. And he had not walked through it.
Of course he had not. Why would he? She had refused to see him for a week. She had sent her uncle to turn him away from the door like a creditor. She had offered him nothing but silence and then expected him to chase her through a storm on the strength of a secondhand message…
You are a fool, Amelia Tate. You have always been a fool.
She seized her cloak from the chair and fastened it with clumsy fingers. The trunk she could manage alone. It was not heavy. She had not accumulated much in her months as a duchess that she cared to keep.
The umbrella was by the door. She took it, pulled on her gloves, and reached for the latch.
Lightning broke across the sky.
The flash was so bright it came through the kitchen windows like noon, bleaching the walls white, and Amelia’s hand froze on the latch as the world tilted.
No. Not now.
She knew the signs. The strange buzzing at the edges of her vision. The way the floor seemed to breathe beneath her feet. She grabbed for the doorframe and missed, her fingers closing on nothing, and the umbrella clattered from her grip.
The second flash was not lightning at all. It was inside her skull, hot and white and consuming, and the kitchen floor rushed upward to meet her.
She did not hit it.
Arms caught her. Hands she knew, even through the fog, because her body had memorized them before her mind ever could. They were ice-cold and shaking and they gripped her sohard it hurt, and she heard her name spoken like a prayer by a man who did not believe in God.
“Amelia? Amelia, look at me. Open your eyes!”
She obeyed, though it took everything she had.
Nicholas’s face swam above her, close enough to count the raindrops caught in his lashes. He was soaked through and white as chalk. There was blood on his temple, a dark line of it running into his collar, and his coat was torn at the shoulder where something had struck him or he had struck something. He looked half-dead.
He looked like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“You’re bleeding…” she whispered.
A sound escaped him that was not quite a laugh. “You nearly collapsed in my arms and that is what concerns you?”
“You’re bleeding, Nicholas…”
“It is nothing. The carriage—” He stopped, shook his head as though the explanation was too long and too stupid to bother with. “I walked.”
“You walked.” She stared at him. The rain hammered against the door he must have come through, still hanging open behind him,letting in the cold and the wet and the noise of the storm. “From where?”
“Walton Street. The axle broke.”
